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Allowing mass surveillance at Olympics undermines EU efforts to regulate AI

169 points by thm 4y ago

stametseater 4y ago
The Olympics and other international orgs like FIFA are a huge mistake and should be done away with completely. They are corrupt organizations that exist to perpetuate themselves and serve the interests of the corrupt government officials they specialize in dealing with. For instance, Russia used the 2014 Olympics in Sochi as a pretext for buying tons of western special forces gear ostensibly to provide security for the games. That gear, vastly superior to old Soviet equipment, is now being used by Russia against Ukraine. And now here we see the Olympics being used to normalize mass surveillance. Enough is enough.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yrcyrc 4y ago
  It’s insane how this government is hell bent on pushing solutions that were all but outlawed. The mandate covers to the end of 2025, much further than the intended purpose.
- aliyfarah 4y ago
  I think it's telling you don't mention what exact 'special forces gear' were provided. As far as I can tell all that was provided were some machine guns and helmets, and don't see any mention of anything useful like night vision goggles, radios etc. Even if these forces were fully specced, SF equipment for a few hundred soldiers would make zero impact on a conflict like Ukraine. It's interesting to see lately how people use their pet random social/political issue and try draw some parallel with the Russia/Ukraine war.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Oh, well, OK, if it was only some basic crowd-control gear such as machine guns and what-not, no biggie, I guess. We cool.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      The original argument was that Russia used it as a pretense to get the equipment to then use it in Ukraine. Did you think Russia didn't have any machine guns before 2014?
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        Try that argument with the ITAR people sometime, see how it works out for you.
      - stametseater 4y ago
        Who said machine guns? aliyfarah, the guy who's trying to discredit the point.
        aliyfarah 4y ago
        They did provide machine guns. [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/06/11/image-shows-russian-spetsnaz-special-forces--using-western-equipment/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/06/11/image-shows...
  - stametseater 4y ago
    Swimmer delivery vehicles, and rebreathers. > I think it's telling you don't mention what exact 'special forces gear' were provided. I think it's telling that you think this is telling.
    - aliyfarah 4y ago
      > That gear, vastly superior to old Soviet equipment, is now being used by Russia against Ukraine. > Swimmer delivery vehicles, and rebreathers. How exactly are these underwater gear being used by Russians in their invasion? Are you saying these were used to blow up their own pipelines?
neilv 4y ago
Note that this headline is by Amnesty International, not a news organization, so it must be read very differently. In a news story with conventions I've seen, I think the "France:" in the headline would mean France officials were vocally opposing or raising a concern about mass surveillance. In this case, however, it seems Amnesty International is addressing France officials/public, after France officials already decided to permit some kind of mass surveillance. Which is almost the opposite.
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we've taken France out of the title now. Thanks!
fwlr 4y ago
I looked but I could not find a good write-up of the actual systems under discussion. “Large-scale, video-based” data fed through AI of some kind, details unspecified. Main points raised in defense were that it could identify unattended luggage (potential bombs) and dangerous crowd movements (potential stampedes). Presumably they also intend to do facial recognition and perhaps behavior analysis, and don’t want to mention those more contentious applications.
sebastien_b 4y ago
[dead]
milsorgen 4y ago
>It has also been well-documented that hostile surveillance technologies are disproportionately used to target marginalized groups, including migrants and black and brown people. Isn't this where AI could really shine? By being colorblind? I would imagine the AI would be used to sort through the vast amounts of data generated and could be used to remove human bias.
- fwlr 4y ago
  I’ve worked on and with SOTA facial recognition, there’s largely two separate claims about the intersection of facial recognition and racial discrimination. One is that it’s inaccurate on minorities, and the other is that it’s used to target minorities. First claim is false, and as far as we could tell rests largely on one experiment a researcher did with a database of a few hundred faces and the default settings on Amazon’s Rekognition. That test demonstrated worse accuracy on minorities and therefore “facial recognition is inaccurate on minorities” became true enough to become a reportable fact - which it was, at the time and scoped to that instantiation of that technology, but from there it got included hundreds or thousands of future articles on facial recognition and racial discrimination, which probably creates an incorrect impression of the overall technology. Reality is that SOTA face rec uses large enough training sets to be “colorblind”, at least in the object level sense of not being more likely to confuse two different people for each other just because they are both minorities of the same ethnicity (I fondly recall an Asian-American CEO saying “hey, it can tell apart Asians better than I can!”). Second claim is true, the high-impact pointy end of facial recognition usage is tackling crime, so it necessarily inherits all the racial discrimination issues in law enforcement.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I’ve worked on and with SOTA facial recognition, there’s largely two separate claims about the intersection of facial recognition and racial discrimination. One is that it’s inaccurate on minorities, and the other is that it’s used to target minorities. > First claim is false, Maybe for some definition of “state of the art”, but, in terms of practical applications that matter even today, it is not. [0] > and as far as we could tell rests largely on one experiment a researcher did with a database of a few hundred faces and the default settings on Amazon’s Rekognition. Then…you haven’t tried very hard to tell what the basis for it is. [1][2] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/us-immigration-cbp-one-app-facial-recognition-bias https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/us-immigrati... [1] Here’s a 2016 article that covers what was already a substantial history of studies showing such bias, going back to 2011. https://apexart.org/images/breiner/articles/FacialRecognitionSoftwareMight.pdf https://apexart.org/images/breiner/articles/FacialRecognitio... [2] But the bigger, broader, and more recent study was in 2019 from NIST. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva... : “While it is usually incorrect to make statements across algorithms, we found empirical evidence for the existence of demographic differentials in the majority of the face recognition algorithms we studied,” said Patrick Grother, a NIST computer scientist and the report’s primary author. […] The NIST study evaluated 189 software algorithms from 99 developers — a majority of the industry.
ncr100 4y ago
/humor Ay yi yi! Amnesty International talking about AI is always interesting!

169 points by thm 4y ago

The Olympics and other international orgs like FIFA are a huge mistake and should be done away with completely. They are corrupt organizations that exist to perpetuate themselves and serve the interests of the corrupt government officials they specialize in dealing with. For instance, Russia used the 2014 Olympics in Sochi as a pretext for buying tons of western special forces gear ostensibly to provide security for the games. That gear, vastly superior to old Soviet equipment, is now being used by Russia against Ukraine. And now here we see the Olympics being used to normalize mass surveillance. Enough is enough.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yrcyrc 4y ago
It’s insane how this government is hell bent on pushing solutions that were all but outlawed. The mandate covers to the end of 2025, much further than the intended purpose.
aliyfarah 4y ago
I think it's telling you don't mention what exact 'special forces gear' were provided. As far as I can tell all that was provided were some machine guns and helmets, and don't see any mention of anything useful like night vision goggles, radios etc. Even if these forces were fully specced, SF equipment for a few hundred soldiers would make zero impact on a conflict like Ukraine. It's interesting to see lately how people use their pet random social/political issue and try draw some parallel with the Russia/Ukraine war.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Oh, well, OK, if it was only some basic crowd-control gear such as machine guns and what-not, no biggie, I guess. We cool.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    The original argument was that Russia used it as a pretense to get the equipment to then use it in Ukraine. Did you think Russia didn't have any machine guns before 2014?
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Try that argument with the ITAR people sometime, see how it works out for you.
    - stametseater 4y ago
      Who said machine guns? aliyfarah, the guy who's trying to discredit the point.
      - aliyfarah 4y ago
        They did provide machine guns. [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/06/11/image-shows-russian-spetsnaz-special-forces--using-western-equipment/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/06/11/image-shows...
- stametseater 4y ago
  Swimmer delivery vehicles, and rebreathers. > I think it's telling you don't mention what exact 'special forces gear' were provided. I think it's telling that you think this is telling.
  - aliyfarah 4y ago
    > That gear, vastly superior to old Soviet equipment, is now being used by Russia against Ukraine. > Swimmer delivery vehicles, and rebreathers. How exactly are these underwater gear being used by Russians in their invasion? Are you saying these were used to blow up their own pipelines?

neilv 4y ago

Note that this headline is by Amnesty International, not a news organization, so it must be read very differently. In a news story with conventions I've seen, I think the "France:" in the headline would mean France officials were vocally opposing or raising a concern about mass surveillance. In this case, however, it seems Amnesty International is addressing France officials/public, after France officials already decided to permit some kind of mass surveillance. Which is almost the opposite.

dang 4y ago
Ok, we've taken France out of the title now. Thanks!

fwlr 4y ago

I looked but I could not find a good write-up of the actual systems under discussion. “Large-scale, video-based” data fed through AI of some kind, details unspecified. Main points raised in defense were that it could identify unattended luggage (potential bombs) and dangerous crowd movements (potential stampedes). Presumably they also intend to do facial recognition and perhaps behavior analysis, and don’t want to mention those more contentious applications.

sebastien_b 4y ago

[dead]

milsorgen 4y ago

>It has also been well-documented that hostile surveillance technologies are disproportionately used to target marginalized groups, including migrants and black and brown people. Isn't this where AI could really shine? By being colorblind? I would imagine the AI would be used to sort through the vast amounts of data generated and could be used to remove human bias.

fwlr 4y ago
I’ve worked on and with SOTA facial recognition, there’s largely two separate claims about the intersection of facial recognition and racial discrimination. One is that it’s inaccurate on minorities, and the other is that it’s used to target minorities. First claim is false, and as far as we could tell rests largely on one experiment a researcher did with a database of a few hundred faces and the default settings on Amazon’s Rekognition. That test demonstrated worse accuracy on minorities and therefore “facial recognition is inaccurate on minorities” became true enough to become a reportable fact - which it was, at the time and scoped to that instantiation of that technology, but from there it got included hundreds or thousands of future articles on facial recognition and racial discrimination, which probably creates an incorrect impression of the overall technology. Reality is that SOTA face rec uses large enough training sets to be “colorblind”, at least in the object level sense of not being more likely to confuse two different people for each other just because they are both minorities of the same ethnicity (I fondly recall an Asian-American CEO saying “hey, it can tell apart Asians better than I can!”). Second claim is true, the high-impact pointy end of facial recognition usage is tackling crime, so it necessarily inherits all the racial discrimination issues in law enforcement.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I’ve worked on and with SOTA facial recognition, there’s largely two separate claims about the intersection of facial recognition and racial discrimination. One is that it’s inaccurate on minorities, and the other is that it’s used to target minorities. > First claim is false, Maybe for some definition of “state of the art”, but, in terms of practical applications that matter even today, it is not. [0] > and as far as we could tell rests largely on one experiment a researcher did with a database of a few hundred faces and the default settings on Amazon’s Rekognition. Then…you haven’t tried very hard to tell what the basis for it is. [1][2] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/us-immigration-cbp-one-app-facial-recognition-bias https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/us-immigrati... [1] Here’s a 2016 article that covers what was already a substantial history of studies showing such bias, going back to 2011. https://apexart.org/images/breiner/articles/FacialRecognitionSoftwareMight.pdf https://apexart.org/images/breiner/articles/FacialRecognitio... [2] But the bigger, broader, and more recent study was in 2019 from NIST. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva... : “While it is usually incorrect to make statements across algorithms, we found empirical evidence for the existence of demographic differentials in the majority of the face recognition algorithms we studied,” said Patrick Grother, a NIST computer scientist and the report’s primary author. […] The NIST study evaluated 189 software algorithms from 99 developers — a majority of the industry.

ncr100 4y ago

/humor Ay yi yi! Amnesty International talking about AI is always interesting!